Wind's life is a current event

It awakens with a joyful rush and roars over the land, heedless of the things in its wake, flying headlong until it collapses.

It blew so strongly over Lake Michigan that by Thursday it had piled two feet of water into Calumet Harbor, Ind.--shoving the water a few inches at a time from the north end of the lake near Beaver Island, Mich., then from Muskegon, Mich., then from near Manistique on Michigan's Upper Peninsula.

Sustained winds in the Chicago area were 20 m.p.h. or so. But offshore from Chicago, a gust hit 52 m.p.h. on Thursday. Other gusts reached 49 in Waukegan, 46 in Kenosha, and still surged inland to wave tree branches and whistle in power lines.

Thursday's Midwest winds awoke Monday off the coast of California, a streak of air flying at jetliner heights, sprinting sometimes at 215 m.p.h. Temperature changes fed it. Pockets of warm air rose so quickly next to pockets of cold that it created a path in the sky for air to run along, as more air behind it hurried to replace what had risen.

It gathered those wisps together and sped away, rushing across the Pacific coast to dive through the Great Plains. It stumbled over the grinding peaks of the Rockies that tore the atmosphere's underside, then gathered itself again on moisture and heat from the Gulf of Mexico.

Enlivened, with one hand it threw seven inches of rain on Gulfport, Miss., and spun 18 twisters in the southern Plains with the other.

It is not malice that makes wind destructive, but momentum. When divers compress air into SCUBA tanks, 12 cubic feet of it weighs one pound. The layer of air over a football field, from the grass to the crossbar of the goalposts, would weigh 48,000 pounds.

The atmosphere is many thousands of feet high, and the wind field for this week's weather system was more than 1,000 miles across, said WGN-Ch. 9 meteorologist Tom Skilling.

Its force unstoppable, it played havoc near Louisville at daybreak Thursday and had raced to the southern tip of Lake Huron by nightfall. The stream moved so much air so quickly that the atmosphere bent around it, creating a wind that fed it and pushed it on.

Eventually, that process will be its downfall.

Already, cold air sucked down from Canada has wrapped around it, choking off the warmth that gave it strength. The swirling bundle of air left over is almost the same temperature now--no longer growing, by increments rushing less and less. Soon, no more air will rise, and none will replace it.

The wind that awoke over the Pacific will fizzle out in Canada, still spinning under its own weight, reluctant to stop, but powerless after all to resist.